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Actually, the reason for that title was because of a point I decided to leave out, but may as well spell out here: "Deciding to talk about politics, even though this may cause you to lose some of your audience" and "Deciding to tell people they're wrong, even though this may cause you to lose some of your audience" are both tradeoffs, and it's odd that LessWrong community norms go so far in one direction on one tradeoff and so far in the other direction on the other tradeoff (at least with regards to certain subjects).
I suspect the reason for this mostly has to do with Eliezer thinking politics are not very important, but also thinking that, say, telling certain people their AI projects are dangerously stupid is very important. But not everyone agrees, and the anti-politics norm is itself a barrier to talking about how important politics are. (Personally, I suspect government action will be important for the future of AI in large part because I expect large organizations in general to be important for the future of AI.)
Telling people they are wrong is almost explicitly about rationality, but we should definitely think about how to do that. If I'm wrong, I want to know that and there's a clear benefit in people telling me that.
I don't see any clear benefit in discussing politics here, so I'm not even sure what the tradeoff is. It's not that politics are not important, but that there's not much we can do about them.
I'd be very interested in a post explaining why discussing politics is more important than other things, not why politics is important, for this rather small rationalist community.
I'm not sure he has bluntly told that to anyone's face. I think he's saying these things to educate his audience, not to change his opponents' minds.
This I might agree with but it doesn't justify talking about other political topics. This particular topic also wouldn't be a mind killer because it's not controversial here and any policies regarding it are still distant hypotheticals.
Well...
I see. I'd rather suspect that person wasn't all that important, nor was the audience at that dinner party, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. I also suspect he's learned some social skills over the years.
In the comments, he makes clear he held the "losing an argument is a good thing, it's on you if you fail to take advantage of it" position. He may no longer feel that way.